Singapore will not pay for COVID-19 treatment to patients who do not want to be vaccinated

The Singapore authorities have announced that as of December 8 they will stop covering the medical expenses of covid-19 to patients who refuse to be vaccinated, except for those who cannot do so for medical reasons or due to age.

“Currently, unvaccinated people account for a large proportion of those who require intensive care and contribute disproportionately to the pressure on our health resources,” the Ministry of Health indicated on its website.

In the last three weeks, infections in the city-state have stabilized at around 3,000 a day, of which 99% of cases are mild or have no symptoms thanks to a vaccination rate of 85 percent of the population .

However, the authorities fear that an increase in infections could saturate the occupation of intensive care units, which are already at 70% of their capacity.

To increase the vaccination rate, authorities are studying inoculation with Pfizer BioNTech medication of children between 5 and 11 years old.

Last month, the authorities announced that workers who have not been vaccinated against covid-19 or have not had the disease recently will have to present a negative antigen test at their workplace as of next January.

Although the Government has lifted most of the restrictions, there are still limitations such as the number of people allowed in restaurants and public events, while increasing the number of countries from where you can travel to the city-state without need to quarantine.

Singapore, one of the countries that best reacted before the covid-19 pandemic with strict measures and the closure of borders, has renounced the strategy of zero cases due to the difficulty of eliminating the virus, especially due to the contagious delta variant.

Since the start of the pandemic, the Singaporean authorities have detected 221,000 COVID-19 infections and 511 deaths, most of them since last August. (I)